[Aramenta] A Crushing Reality

[Naiya]

Rue

Rue tried unsuccessfully to hide a smile as the other finally sat. At first Rue was startled by how close the woman moved, but recalling her soft way of speaking she quickly relaxed back into her work.

She had slipped the needle through the base- the quill, she thought it might be called- and was threading thinnest of her strings through it. She couldn't decide what should follow, the other, shorter feather? Or did the look call for space between the feathers? And what to fill that space with?

This, she decided was much more difficult than making clothing, Rue knew clothing much more than she knew accessories and jewelry.

The warmth of the other girl pressed against her cheek and Rue held still to keep from bumping into her as her faerie voice drifted through the space between them. Aramenta sat back into her seat fully, but Rue was frozen in her place.

For the second time today she found her emotions running rampant within her chest. Aramenta was seemingly pleased to have put her words so well, the closest thing Rue had seen to a real smile gracing her lips. It was a good thing she had slipped her attention back to her lace, though, because Rue knew her face held none of the soft serenity that she had been working so hard to impose over herself.

If the younger girl had glanced up in the moment, she might have caught the astonishment and fear that masked any of the beauty Rue normally claimed as her own. She had been so careful with her words, and yet Aramenta had seen right to her heart.

Rue bowed over the feathers in her hands, letting her hair fall across her face so that she could hide her expression from the girl who saw too much. "A worthwhile endeavor." Rue tried for a semblance of calm in her words, phrasing her words so that she would not reflect anymore notes of displeasure towards her family.

She twisted the bronze strings in her hands, deciding to pin the two feathers together in one place. She tightened her grip around the threads, feeling the bite of string and the pricks of her nails pressing into her calloused flesh of her palms.

The pain cleared her head, as she found it often did, and she relaxed her hold beginning to press the needle through her second feather.

"Do you..." She stopped at the sound of her voice, surprised at how calmly it escaped. "Do you think you could offer advice on this charm?" She flipped the hair back out of her way, showing the girl her work. "I hope to wear it in my hair, but I am not sure how to design the piece that will hold it in the braid."

The topic was out of the blue, but, with any luck, it would steer them away from her family.

Nightsong

[Aramenta]

Rue's response - decidedly circumspect - drew Ara's eyes back upward. And the ensuing silence, and the curtain of hair in front of Rue's face left Ara confused, and embarrassed: she had clearly made some sort of faux pas. Ara blushed, and looked bak down, accepting the silence. As the other girl focused harder on the feathers she was sewing, Ara closed more tightly in on her own business, her cheeks burning, and her heart shamed.

Her fingers wound the cotton thread more intently, pulling the ends through more quickly - the web of filleting was nearly done, now. She bound it into the cross-grain fillet she had run before, and went onward. Pull, loop, push, pull loop, push, 10, then 20 times, and then the edge of the lace collar, where she threaded the two together, and laid the lace out across her knee, smoothing it, checking it against the blind pattern behind, evening the stitches, and checking her proportion. Her fingers ran across the knots, slowly, trying to involve her brain, which still burned with embarrassment.

Then, Rue spoke again, asking for help, and very, very timidly, Ara turned her eyes up to look at her. The other girl was serene, at least apparently, and held the feathers forward to show her. Ara blushed and chewed a lip, but nodded, looking at the feathers. She'd never made jewelry, herself, and stared at it with an utter lack of experience. She looked down at the cotton cord she was knotting into lace, then back at the feathers and chewed her lip, leaning forward again, to the other girls ear, but cannot think how to explain her idea, so she sits back and reaches out questioningly to take the feather, waiting to see that its alright with the other girl, with a questioning, apologetic eye.
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[Naiya]

Rue

Rue was unsure at first, not quite clear on Aramenta's intent. She had looked intimidated by her question, and so Rue chose to reassure her.

"I've never really made something like this before, so I don't quite know what I'm doing." She nodded her head to the silent question, holding out the feathers to the girl, curious to see what thought had struck her.

She relaxed as the girl reached for the feathers once more, glad to have successfully turned the conversation away from the shambles of her family life. Her mind, now free of both the current worry, and the distraction of her project, wandered. She found her head filled with the memory of her recent time spent in the arms of a near stranger, and she sighed softly pink tinting her cheeks.

What had gone so horribly wrong between then and when he had left?

Oh, yeah. She'd imagined it.

Nightsong

[Aramenta]

Ara took the feathers in her tiny hand, rolling the quills together and looking at them a moment. Her eyes flicker back and forth, repeatedly between the bauble, and Rue, ensuring she was not doing something she shouldn't. She took her lace, pulled the latest loop large and set it aside for a moment. Then, she rummaged through her bag, found a bit of black twine, and some beeswax, waxing the tip heavily. Clumsily trying to hold both feathers at once, she did a long chain stitch of eyes, just like she had been doing on the lace - though bulkier with the twine. Then, she turned and started making a line of crochets around the right-hand quill. It was an awkward movement, not natural for her, and the stitches came out a bit untidy, but it showed the concept - she ran the crochets down the length of the quill, then around and up the other side, crocheting on the second feather in clumsy knots, pulled very tight to try to hold the waxy quills in by compression alone.

She looked up between each stitch the entire time, keeping an eye on Rue, as she grew a bit dreamy, then a bit pink in the cheeks, and Ara frowned. She set the hook and with her free hand, signed quietly, "I embarras you?
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[Naiya]

Rue

Aramenta's voice startled her back to the present and her cheeks flushed darker red. Apology she signed, shaking her head softly in a negative to her question. "My mind is not quite my own today, I hope you can forgive me?"

She focused once more on the feathers in the other girl's hands and excitement lit her eyes. "It's wonderful!" She did not have the eyes to see the deviation of the stitches or the unsteadiness of the other's hands. "Will it hold them?"

She reached across the space to finger the looping of the twine. It was just nice enough to suit the feathers without subtracting from their beauty.

Nightsong

[Aramenta]

Ara blushed a little, and smiled wanly leaning in to the other girl's ear again. Her hair was thick and a little frizzy with the low-water summer, and thick, dark strands of it snagged against the other girl's lips, as Ara leaned in to speak this time.

"I have not spoken to anyone... for... anyone a while, I'm sorry, its my fault."

She leaned back, but just a little, to look over the other girls lap, where she reached in to test the feather-work - the quill started to slide and she frowned, shaking her head, and turning her lips back to other ear.

"The twine is not strong enough alone. Maybe you can braid something in to make it tighter?"

The closeness of another body, however, caught at her senses, and, inexplicably to an outsider likely, she blushed again, sitting back timidly, a hand going to her belly - the truth was simply that her body felt awkward and embarrassing, and the closeness had made her aware of it again. But that set off its own chain of gloomy thoughts, and she receded into herself a little. Her hands, clumsily, signed a deflection, preemptively.

"You make things for you? Or the shop?"
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[Naiya]

Rue

Rue had to purse her lips to remove the soft tickle of Aramenta's hair, lingering on the dry skin there. She could see what the other girl was trying to point out, and she frowned her face a mask of consideration. She threaded a section of bronze string through the hole she had created in the larger feather, twisting the length through the spaces between the twine before offering the item for closer inspection.

She thought the glint of color was well suited, and it would match her tunic, but still she knew little of ornamental things. Maybe it would look bad with the silver and purple charms already in her hair?

She was watching Aramenta's face for approval of her fix of the hair piece, so she couldn't help but to notice the blush that colored her cheeks. Had she been staring at the girl? That would make sense. She turned her gaze away.

The corner of her vision caught Aramenta's movement of her hand to her belly, protective of the child growing within. Rue should have been in the younger girl's place, married and pregnant. Maybe then her family would have been happy with her.

She was drawn to the girl's signing, and she considered for a moment before answering.

"I usually just make things for the shop, or if someone comes in and asks me to make them an item." She held up the ornament once again, "This, though, is for me."

Nightsong

[Aramenta]

Ara looked at the charm, with the copper threaded through it now, and cocked her head, nodding thoughtfully, signing 'very pretty.' Her gesture was sincere, but lacking in gusto. It was pretty, that much she knew. Her mind, disssociating from her primary line of thought, wandered over it professionally. The copper wire covered up her sloppy knot work nicely. Looking at it now, she considered how to make it better the next time. Wax the entire twine, perhaps, so that it runs more evenly and knots more predictably. Adjust each knot by hand afterward. She wondered if the twine, not particularly soft after all, would irritate Rue's neck, and considered in her mind the thought of of what other fiber might be used there.

But it didn't really work, the idle musing. It took a bit of the edge off her thoughts, but not much. In some ways it even made them worse. How happy, how very much happier, her mind thought, her husband would be with this girl - young, beautiful, clever. A true Drykas, not simply by name and an accident of youth, but in spirt a child of the grass! Her eyes looked up from the feather to the other girl with a kind of yearning, not desire - sweet mother of the earth, whatever would have inflamed any desire in Ara normally was unlikely to have any effect in the state she was in - but more... a wish-to be the other girl. It was a childish feeling, and subtly, as the power of it grew, that childishness found form in her features, her shoulders turning in, her chin tucking down a little, her eyes growing wide and a little nervous - or more, willing to display the nervousness that was already in them. IT gave her the appearance of an unaccountably pregnant child.

She nodded, and leaned forward again, keeping the words behind the thoughts locked in, as much as possible, her voice restrained and perhaps a bit fawning.

"It is pretty, the bronze, it suits your hair. We... you... could maybe make some for plaiting into your strider, to match." Normally, that would be a long sentence for her, naturally, by both circumstance and temperament a bit reticent with speechifying. But something, perhaps the exhaustion, perhaps the comfort of actually speaking with someone, perhaps simply the way her mind has melted away her own identity into the idea-of-being-someone-else for the moment, makes her linger, and her voice drifts, a little dreamily.

"A row of them, and green and... " she looks at the girls skin, sun-kissed and clean, "Maybe red, but dark, the color of old blood, in a your clothes... and you could... you would be very lovely that way, riding to your wedding one day. Or with your feathers and a pale green dress, green like first-spring-grass, and a child held on your lap, your firstborn..."

She didn't so much stop as simply drift off a little, her eyes not fixed or focused. But she shook her head, almost imperceptibly, and took her hook back up, rethreading it through the loop on the lacework on her knee. With small, movement, she begins a magic-circle of tiny chain stitches, tugs it tight, and begins to knot a piece of motif to attach to the lace. Her eyes stay down, somewhere around her knee. The visions stayed steady in her skull. The young girl riding to her wedding, a bit of summer-green knotted round her wrist, and laced around the wrist of her lover in turn. The young mother rocking a sleeping child. The wife, sitting on a leather-and-wooden three legged stool, laughing gently at something as she leans over her cook-fire, the bronze-feather charm hanging beside a cheek clear and healthy, and pale bronze itself from the autumn sunshine. Her own face open and closes her eyes slowly, her lips softly set, like withered rose petals on a cheese that has not finished setting.
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[Naiya]

Rue

Rue blushed deeply at her words, it was less and less likely that she would have such an opportunity as more seasons passed without such. The Drykas needed children, but her sun kissed skin was hardly a color desirable for the grasslands, and her red hair only added to the oddity of her nature, uncommon in the grasslands for good reason. So if she were to grow past her childbearing years without child, it wouldn't be so great a loss to the city. There were plenty of young preatty girls, ones who's skin was not so sensitive to the sun, who were more useful to their husbands than Rue could be.

Ones who didn't fall all over a strange man just because he showed her kindness.

She shook her head. Now was not the time to think of him, she had no right.

And then Aramenta mentioned a child, and Rue's face darkened further. Everything the younger girl had, Rue wished for her own. A husband, a family, a child on the way.

She wanted them so desperately she had projected those emotions onto the first man who had been kind to her in her shop. It was childish and far from proper. She should behave more like Armenta, reserved, polite, kind. Maybe then some man would think maybe Rue was worth making his wife.

Instead she was loud and lacking in grace, rude and troublesome. She could only hope that she would change before she was left to spend her days alone.

"Yes, I think Wildfire would like that. Although I don't know if the red would suit him, he is a very red lever chestnut. I think you would like him, if you met."

Nightsong

[Aramenta]

Ara drifted dreamily through her vision, her mouth smiling gently, and her eyes growing bleaker. The stitches on her lap whirled in slow circles, piling upon themselves, in loops of slow increases, a shallow cone forming, then a dome, imperfect, and a bit child-like. She had just started on this, on the motifs, recently, trying to earn a bit more if she could, to pull her weight better. The circularity of it, the way the stitches rounded about themselves, reminded her of her spindle, and made it feel familiar. The heart of a wildflower, perhaps a black-eyed susan form the pebbled texture, began to form slowly as she thought.

Her eyes looked up, and were shocked to see that Rue had, herself, gone into a reverie - Ara had so fallen into her thoughts she had not noticed. Ara frowned - how long had she been musing? Had she bored the other girl? The feel of speech on her tongue made her mind absent and she opened her mouth to speak halfway before realizing that would not work without leaning forward, and that seemed awkward now, like an interruption. Her hands were full of the knotwork-lace, so this left her altogether mute. So she sat back, silently, and let the knots guide themselves - imperfectly, of course - and watched the other girl, her slow, dark eyes following the girl with a confused non-insistent sort of question in them.

The glory of being nearly mute, after all, is that it means, by necessity, one is left considering the wisdom of what one leaves unsaid. And after all, Ara realized, what would she have said to the other girl? Perhaps there was nothing to say. Why had she come anyway? For company? For distraction? No... no, she needed something,s he knew it, she felt the edge of need, and didn't know what, too far from her own heart to translate its groans. And if she didn't know what she wanted, she reasoned, why was she annoying this clever, fair thing? What exactly was she hoping for? That her mind would just find its track by listening to the other woman?

Rue's response about her strider, though, rough Ara's eyes back down, to her stitching, and she thought of Canter, and of Livvy, of how she, Ara, who had had all things, had been unable to keep any, Canter treating her as if she wished she'd chosen some other girl to be Drykas, and Livvy, gone now, off in her new home, probably grateful to be rid of Ara with her moods and her blindness and...

But Canter had chosen her. Canter had chosen HER. She had been, at one time, or still was, a little bit, a Drykas, for Canter, also, had not left, not entirely. Ara's knots stopped, and she leaned forward slowly, next to the woman, not quite as close this time, shy to press her voice on the other girl. This makes her words very faint.

"My... my grandmother... my grandmother, she says...or..." a slight quaver, "Anyway. She said... you can tell a lot about someone by the strider that chooses them, because the striders know what they need. People... the Undrykas, they must live so sad, because they never know if they have a reason. Dryers, you know, you have a reason, because otherwise, why would you strider have chosen you? You just have to find out what it is... I... I guess." She smiles, strained, more feelable than visible to the other girl with her proximity, "I would love to... to meet yours. You are a very interesting story to tell."

A clumsy way of saying it, and once it was out, Ara realized what a stumbling wretch of a description of what she meant to say it was. But it as something. And it was what she could manage.
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